Movie palaces featuring elaborate rococo interiors emerged as a new type of viewing platform in pre-war cities around the globe. Through synchronizing exposure time and projection time in these spaces, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto preserves the duration of an entire film in a single shot. In Sugimoto’s photographs, states of saturation and partial illumination are juxtaposed and we are left bearing the context of the spectacle rather than the undecipherable content of the screen itself. As an idealized space, the saturated screen is alien to its environment. We can imagine the audience in this space - an estranged branch of modernity voluntarily subjecting themselves to the discomfort of reconciliation.
Rather, the spaces remain empty much like the stadium in Madrid in which the 1987 European Cup was fought. The game was broadcast internationally though the “real” event, as Jean Baudrillard stated, occurred in a vacuum, stripped of it context and visible only from afar, televisually.
The stadium has a similar relationship to its urban periphery as Sugimoto’s screens have to the ornamentation of pre-war movie palaces.
In anticipation of director Terry Gilliam’s collaboration with musical artist Arcade Fire for their performance of “The Suburbs” tomorrow night, one can imagine the audience suspended between broadcasts. Between Gilliam’s youtube video and the vacuum tubes in the band’s amplifiers, is Madison Square Garden destined to be rendered another vacuum? Where would you prefer to be, or does it really matter?
Media events at large are becoming increasingly ulterior to spatiality as curatorial and representational processes are being used to validate their occupation of time. The stratification of these processes occurs immediately, assuming cryptographic if not subliminal forms. Once merely intuitive, the content of such events has become regulated, accessible only through subscriptive lenses - i.e. 3d glasses, contractual screens. The saturation wanes as we are elapsed in its presence. We are no longer at the “receiving end” of such information; Rather, we are amidst layers with objective goals of transformation, representation, and perpetuation.
The promise of this media event seems to be in its ability to disturb its periphery. The music carries a portentous tone. Certainly, if we read into the lyrics, it has the potential to subvert the spectator/tribe relation engendered by venues like MSG but the density of evocative gestures in the music goes without saying. The music will certainly resonate within the suburbs despite the fact that it is a far cry from the band’s tour destinations. By virtue of this phenomenal event, points of contention will arise from the suburban rituals it liberates. Emergent tribes and media conglomerates alike will project their desires on these newly exposed places to tell a similar story a different way.
see the event tomorrow night at 10 here http://www.youtube.com/arcadefirevevo
